New Panel To Oversee Shuttle Test

March 15, 1986|By Storer Rowley, Chicago Tribune. Also contributing to this story was Tribune correspondent Howard Witt in Houston.

WASHINGTON — Presidential commissioners investigating the space shuttle Challenger explosion agreed Friday to set up an independent group of government and private experts to oversee unbiased testing that the panel believes will explain how safety seals on the shuttle`s right booster rocket caused the accident.

The independent group will consist of four to six individuals from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Air Force and private defense and aerospace firms, according to a commission insider who asked not to be identified. They will be named next week, he said.

William Rogers, chairman of the presidential commission, called a week ago for independent observers to oversee tests by NASA rocket managers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and by Morton Thiokol Inc., maker of the suspect booster. He indicated at the time he was concerned that the tests not appear self-serving.

At Friday`s meeting here, commission members and officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration reviewed photographic and film evidence of Challenger`s ill-fated flight. The shuttle`s seven-member crew died in a fiery explosion 73 seconds after takeoff Jan. 28. The commission expects the independent observers to help the panel determine the exact cause of the explosion within a month.

Commissioners and NASA officials also received a report from Rogers and staff director Alton Keel on their meetings this week with officials from Martin Marietta Corp., maker of the shuttle`s external fuel tank.

The source said later that the tank has been ``virtually ruled out`` by commission members as a possible cause. NASA has said a failure of the right booster is the probable cause of the accident but declined to rule out the possibility of a small hydrogen leak in the tank as a contributing factor.

Commission members working on small fact-finding panels that visited NASA installations this week made reports Friday and plan to hit the road again next week, the source said. There will be a public hearing here next Friday on their progress, during which the tank will most likely be exonerated as the cause.

Members are becoming ``increasingly confident`` that the independent tests will confirm that rubber O-ring seals at a lower joint on the right booster were to blame. The seals are meant to prevent 5,800-degree flames from escaping from the rocket and causing an explosion. Such a burn-through near the joint occurred seconds before Challenger exploded.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that Air Force Gen. Charles Yeager, a commission member, said in Dearborn, Mich., that space shuttle flights could safely resume immediately in warm weather, because cold appears to be the chief cause of the Challenger disaster.

Yeager, a test pilot and author of a best-selling autobiography, told a news conference that ``the accident will actually make the shuttle safer than before the accident`` because of the problems uncovered by investigators, the AP said.

But commission member Richard Feynman told the Huntsville (Ala.) Times on Thursday: ``There`s so many flaws and faults, it would take me quite a while to explain. No doubt in our final report, you`ll see.``

Also discussing the future of shuttle flights, newly named Johnson Space Center Director Jesse Moore insisted Friday that NASA is not being overly ambitious by planning to launch up to 18 shuttle flights a year within three years even though the cause of the Challenger disaster has yet to be officially determined.

``What is to say that we cannot ensure that this system is fully safe to operate with a high degree of confidence with the additional steps we might have to put in?`` Moore said. ``I don`t want to say we`re only going to fly two flights a year.``

Speaking to a small group of reporters in a half-hour interview, Moore said the tentative shuttle schedule outlined on Capitol Hill this week by acting NASA Administrator William Graham was drafted only for ``budgetary planning`` and may not be realistic.

Graham told congressmen that NASA hopes to launch 9 shuttle flights in the first year of resumed operations, 12 in the next year and 18 in the third. ``That`s a planning schedule,`` Moore said. ``It was put out for the purposes of doing budgetary planning and it`s the best schedule we can plan to meet in that period of time.``